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tables shows new possibilities. We sent away over 2,000 carloads in 

 the first three and the last two months — practically winter months at 

 the East — and 6,798 carloads in the year. The garden is becoming a 

 close companion of the orchard in California. 



The time has passed when we find it necessary to urge tree planting 

 and are forced to adduce evidence of the capability of soil and climate. 

 Everybody understands now what we can do. By our fruits we are 

 known. 



The real problems for solution relate to our market, and we may as 

 well admit at once that they are vital to success. Any treatment of 

 the matter except with frankness and candor would be unjust to our- 

 selves and unjust to the industry. We have invited the people of other 

 States to come here and make homes and engage in horticulture. The 

 land barons, and the land-grant railroad companies, and speculators and 

 dealers in real estate, and commission merchants, and fruit dealers, have 

 made the fruit industry the chief attraction to home-seekers from the 

 East and Great West. 



These agencies, especially the land-grant railroad companies, have been 

 active in promoting settlement here, and have not always been scrupu- 

 lous in locating their people. The result has been a great deal of tree 

 planting on unsuitable land, and not always of desirable fruits, and of 

 bad handling of orchards and orchard products. Now that we have the 

 industry so deeply rooted, and now that it is spreading by its own 

 momentum as rapidly as it ought, the question of our market presses 

 upon us. 



I have shown that the shipments of green deciduous fruits increased 

 over 133 per cent in three years ending 1893. This is by far the most 

 important branch of our business. If it can be maintained at the profit 

 easily attainable it will always solve our problem. It means quick 

 returns of cash; it means the minimum of labor in preparation for 

 market; it means relief to the market of fruits in the dried form; it 

 means consumption by a large class of persons who use little if any 

 dried fruit; it means a market in advance of the season for consumption 

 of dried fruit, and at a time when the demand is for fresh fruit. To the 

 transportation companies it means freight charges on about six times as 

 much fruit as they would get in the dried form, and withal more profit 

 to the grower than in the dried form, if prices can be maintained. 



In the face of this, however, there is danger that shipments of green 

 deciduous fruits will fall off greatly, if they do not cease altogether, 

 should we have a repetition of 1893 and 1894. I know there were 

 special causes at work in 1893 and 1894 that may not appear again for 

 years, but these aside, the business is on a very precarious footing. It 

 is, under existing conditions, the most uncertain game of chance I know 

 of, unless it is betting on the jumping bean of Mexico. 



It seems impossible to bring the transportation companies to a real- 

 izing sense of the situation. We have been driven, through the failure 

 of railroad companies to expedite ventilated cars, to the use of ice. We 

 must pay for the ice, and also for its transportation, and also a profit 

 to the builders of refrigerator cars, and this just about absorbs all there 

 is in the business as profit to the grower. And all this is unnecessary, 

 for much of our fruit, if we could have quick transit. ' 



I don't know much about railroading, but it does seem to me that a 

 train of fifteen cars could be taken on passenger time to Chicago for 



